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President’s Council on Bioethics: Against life-extension technology
"The ability to retard aging puts into question the meaning of aging in our lives, and the way we ought best to regard it: Is aging a disease? Is it a condition to be treated or cured? Does that mean that all the generations that have come before us have lived a life of suffering, either waiting for a cure that never came or foolishly convincing themselves that their curse was just a blessing in disguise? Is the finitude of human life, as our ancestors experienced it and as our faiths and our philosophies have taught us to understand it, really just a problem waiting to be solved?
The anti-aging medicine of the not-so-distant future would treat what we have usually thought of as the whole, the healthy, human life as a condition to be healed. It therefore presents us with a questionable notion both of full humanity and of the proper ends of medicine."
From "Ageless Bodies" in a report, BEYOND THERAPY: Biotechnology and the
Pursuit of Happiness, issued by the President's Council on Bioethics,
Washington, D.C. (October, 2003)
Available at:
http://bioethics.georgetown.edu/pcbe/reports/beyondtherapy/
Extracts:
“Using rapidly growing new knowledge about how and why we age, scientists have
achieved some success in prolonging lifespans in several animal species. To be
sure, there is at present no medical intervention that slows, stops, or reverses
human aging, and for none of the currently marketed agents said to increase
human longevity is there any hard scientific evidence to support the hyped-up
claims.1 Yet the prospect of possible future success along these lines raises
high hopes, as well as profound and complicated questions.
To elucidate these hopes, and to introduce these questions, we will examine some
of the potential techniques for the extension of longevity and youthfulness, and
some of their imaginable consequences. Our aim here, as throughout this report,
is not primarily to analyze the details of the scientific prospects, or to
predict which techniques might prove most effective in retarding aging. Rather
we consider a range of reasonably plausible possibilities in order to discern
their potential human and ethical implications.i But before we can begin to
examine such possibilities, we must inquire about the underlying desire. What do
we wish for when we yearn for “ageless bodies”?
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© 2002 Global Action on Aging
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